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Help Me Help You! Ask Me to Tackle Topics Important To You.

Lorenzo Pasqualis on November 07, 2017

I have been building software since 1984. Other than to my family, I owe everything I have today to the software industry, software engineers and t...
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Shobhit Puri

Thanks for your blog posts. They have been really useful reads. Your list of topics is definitely intriguing.

From what I understand, around late 2000's there was a lot of roar about Mobile Apps when smart phones started becoming mainstream and a good chunk of developers switched to learning Mobile App Development. Now there are billions of apps in market and just having a new app on the store doesn't take you anywhere. Ofcourse, there are problems still which can be solved using the apps or maybe solved better than the existing apps. However it is starting to become stagnant atleast from what I see.

With the rate at which data is being generated now, there looks like an increasing need to extract meaningful information from the data being collected. There seems to be a growing rise in interest in Data Science, Machine Learning and other AI related fields. Seeing the need, numerous universities have also opened new professional graduate programs that provide students with specialization in it.

Then there is blockchain. Every other day, there seems to be a new startup attempting to use blockchain technology to solve existing problems in better way.

I am inquisitive to know your thoughts on the topic that with this fast paced industry, along side the full time jobs, what is the best way "to evolve better and faster"? Not everyone wants / can afford to go back to schools full time. Then there are MOOC's which are helpful for sure. But even if one put in efforts to learn from MOOC's and develop projects, how to approach making the switch to the new field professionally.

Since you started writing software years before I was even born, you would have seen similar trends multiple times in the past. Eager to know your thoughts.

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Lorenzo Pasqualis • Edited

Trends change all the time. We are in the middle of the AR/VR trend now, and I expect AI to explode in the next few years. How to deal with these kinds of changes is an excellent topic, and a difficult one. I will definitely write about it!! Thank you!!!

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jorin

Hi Lorenzo, not sure if you are interested in this, but I would love to hear more people speak about testing software.
In particular I am lately thinking a lot about testing of systems in a time that everyone want to build micro services.
We can write unit and integration tests to ensure that each service works, but what approaches do people take to ensure their system is working as a whole? How do you create tests that have to deal with potentially hundreds of separate services at once? Do people run automated tests for this or do they spend a lot on QA in a dedicated staging environment?

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Lorenzo Pasqualis

Ah, that is a very interesting topic indeed. I'll put it on the list.

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Subbu Lakshmanan

Lorenzo,

You have amazing topics lined up. Eagerly waiting for them!!

Could you throw your thoughts about working in multi-culture environment (different ethnicity/age group) in terms of technical leadership/helping the team to migrate to new(stable) technologies/development practices.

People fear change, but sometimes change is necessary, unavoidable. How could one can help the team mitigate this fear.

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Lorenzo Pasqualis

Oh, yes. This is a topic of great interest to me. I have been very focused on gender equality in the last few months and did a bunch of work to understand the strange phenomena of gender discrimination in tech (it drives me crazy).
I will definitely write about multi-cultural environments as well. In my team, I have many different ethnicities.
Thank you for bringing up this important topic!!

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Kasey Speakman • Edited

Doers vs Leaders is a topic of interest to me. I have observed this difference as well. Having worked with doers, I know that I am not one. I get really drained by rote implementation of assigned tasks. I love to learn about how things work and relate to each other. It often follows that people come to me for tech guidance because I have done the research, or can work it out if given a little time. But when it comes to volume of tasks that get checked off the backlog, I usually compare unfavorably to doers, and am disappointed in myself for that. I'd love to hear your thoughts.

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Lorenzo Pasqualis

Cool, thank you!! It is an important topic. I actually believe that the Doer vs. Leader balance often shifts throughout somebody's career and over the years. I am definitely planning to blog about it.

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Andy Zhao (he/him)

Love the idea! Also interested in doers vs leaders. I'm not too convinced that there's much of a difference, but I understand that leadership is essential to progress. I still have some thoughts milling though that I can't quite put into words yet, so it'd be great to hear your thoughts.

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Lorenzo Pasqualis

I think of leadership as a career choice more than a necessity for progress. I also see technical leadership and people leadership as two different things. That is a very interesting topic that I will definitely tackle.
Thank you for chiming in!! I really appreciate it.

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Rajeev R. Sharma

Hi Lorenzo,
Great initiative. Since we are taking suggestions, I'm curious to learn more about software security.

What approaches to take for securing our systems (keeping cloud service platforms in mind)? how to test our software's security?